Case study of applying Agile, particular an experimentation/lean startup mindset to digital marketing project in an Australian bank

1. Learning to do Agile in
Marketing!
Antony Marsh
Agile and Lean Coach
PT Ekipa Indonesia

2. My Journey
1. Context
2. Challenges
3. Way forward - Overseas
Travel Journey Moment
4. Lessons

3. Context

4. Context - Marketing function in large Australian Bank
● Marketing still a silo - and
product silos within Marketing
● 200 marketing consultants
● “Segment” and “Programs”
teams
● Supporting teams in Delivery,
Analytics, Digital
● Had been doing “Agile” for 18
months
● I come from tech - Business
Analyst and Agile practitioner
for about 10 years

5. Work done by the marketing teams
● Manage and develop large
marketing campaigns
● Could be product-focused
or brand-focused
● Still heavy emphasis on
traditional channels TV,
radio, print, “Out of Home”

6. ● TV
● Youtube
● Facebook
● Twitter

8. Why do Agile in Marketing?
● Need to move away from large, expensive
traditional “above the line” campaigns
● Marketing is digital - technology is digital
● Data-driven marketing - test a hypothesis!
● Understand the customer better - customer
journeys and moments
● Move away from pushing products to
connecting with customers - lifetime value
proposition

14. Where we were on our Agile journey?
● Agile broadly supported by teams and
management
● Consultants had implemented basic,
“traditional agile”
● Agile had demonstrated some benefits
(10% staff decrease, but productivity up
20%)
● Management felt Agile could help even
more if extended and improved
● Customer journeys and moments

16. Agile Software Development vs Agile Marketing
Software
● Creative
● Innovative
● High technical risk
● Complex, new problems must be
solved
● New processes
● Building a product
● One product/outcome at a time
Marketing
● Creative
● Innovative?
● Technology well understood
● Simple customer hypotheses
tested
● Repeated processes
● Marketing products or services
● Many campaigns/ads/outcomes
simultaneously

17. Challenges

18. Marketing campaign life-cycle
Product
team
Segment
team
Programs
Team
Ideation/
brief
Creative
Agency
Programs
Team
ApprovalApprovals -
Marketing,
Legal, Risk,
Brand,
Stakeholder
Other
Creation
of assets
- digital
and
physical
Deploy
assets -
digital
and
physical
Analytics/
feedback -
make
changes
Decomm
-ision

20. Handoffs,
waste,
waiting,
rework

21. Challenges
● Complex, non-linear value stream
● Teams highly specialised, not cross-functional
● Work is outsourced to creative agencies who work at a different cadence - so
waste, waiting, re-work
● Teams then manage work through a complex approval process - waste,
waiting, re-work
● Teams then pass on work to Analytics and Deployment teams - waste,
waiting, rework
● Poor/no backlogs exacerbate these problems
● Weak/No Product Owners
● Product development Agile didn’t work! How could we move to a more
data/customer journey/moment focused way of work?

22. What Agile methods would suit Marketing - let’s try
those!!!
● Break away from a Product Development
Agile model
● Become more cross-functional
● Form, test and iterate on hypotheses quickly
- MVP!!!!
● Experiment with team structures and
processes
● Get value to market faster

23. What we did
● Move away from product development Agile towards continuous flow
Agile/Lean
● Kanban and scrumban boards to suit repetitive process work and identify
bottlenecks
● Squads (not teams) to encourage cross-functionality
● 90 day plans to assist with product backlogs/sprint planning
● Portfolio views of work for planning and tracking work over the Quarter
● Attention paid to prioritising work - less is more!

24. Way Forward - Overseas
Travel Journey Moment

25. Why Transform Digitally in Marketing?
● Need to move away from large, expensive
traditional “above the line” campaigns
● Marketing is digital - technology is digital
● Data-driven marketing - test a hypothesis!
● Understand the customer better - customer
journeys and moments
● Move away from pushing products to
connecting with customers - lifetime value
proposition

26. How could we become data driven, digital marketers
● Become more cross-functional in teams
● Form, test and iterate on hypotheses quickly
● Experiment with team structures and
processes
● Get value to market faster

27. Problem - customers don’t register for overseas travel
Increased fraud, loss of cards, cards blocked, poor customer experience,
increased cost to bank for call centres, replacement cards, emergency financial
help

28. App already sent alerts if customer was at the airport

29. Goal - encourage registration of travel
● Better customer service,
● reduced cost of call centres and helping customers overseas
● reduced credit card fraud
● Cross sell and promote other products (travel credit/debit, insurance, partner
products)

30. TXN airfares?? > get email > open email > click through to site >
authenticated > register overseas trip

31. Business hypothesis
We Believe That identifying customers through transactions and emailing
them
Will Result In some of these customers registering for overseas travel on
the internet banking site
We Will Know We Have Succeeded When more than 10% of the customers
who click through to the site from the email register for an overseas
travel trip
** secondary experiment … could we set up a quick, agile, cross-functional team to
run the experiment?

32. ● Formed a virtual team - with Data - Email
template team - Creative - Digital production -
Digital analytics
● Simple Kanban board
● Two month timeline End to End

33. ● Concept proven! - quick acting,
virtual cross-functional team
could get faster results than
siloed teams
● Hypothesis validated - a
significant % of customers
registered for travel
● Team empowered - continue
formulate hypotheses and
test/learn/adapt
Result!

34. What’s our next experiment?
Can we cross-sell other products like travel insurance? Would a travel debit card
help? What if we allowed customers to block/unblock their cards while travelling?

35. Lessons for
Agile
Marketers

36. @AgileAnt
antony.marsh@ekipa.co